Core Post 3 Changing values of visibility and invisibility in the context of surveillance

Visibility and invisibility are central terms when discussing surveillance in general and especially in the context of big data. I’d like to point at some specific works of art that are discussing and complicating these terms

Marie Sester’s EXPOSURE

(a 3-channel HD video installation, 2001/2008 https://vimeo.com/8203900)

uses various emerging ways of imaging technologies such as 3-D laser scans of buildings and large-scale X-rays. In a slowly meandering sequence of large images looking inside trucks containing smuggled items or the interior of laser scanned houses. The invisible gaze penetrates the objects, turning them into forensic interrogations. Her piece deals with topics such as hyper-vigilance, control and imposition of ideology on range of representations.

Jil Magid turns the gaze back onto the impersonal policing institutions. Her work Evidence Locker (2014 https://vimeo.com/144209618) is an archive of videos and emails between the artist and the employees of Liverpool CCTV system. In order to make herself visible, she is wearing a red coat. She is using the resolution of the system, which at that time would not necessarily recognize her face. “Treating the cameras as elements in a personal relationship with the municipal authorities, and letter-writing as a diaristic confessional abetting her own surveillance, the result is a captivating, mysterious exercise in oversharing, a performative self-portrait facilitated by using the technology of our oft-vilified constabulary panopticon.”

Jill Magid work also taps into the idea of recognition and self-recognition. Hito Steyerl quotes Althusser in the book Pattern Discrimination. “What is recognition? Remember the famous primordial scene of (self)-recognition described by Louis Althusser: a policeman hails someone in the street yelling “Hey you!” In that moment the person is supposed to recognize himself both as subject (“you”) and as subjected to the policeman’s authority (“hey!”). “Hey you!” is the primary formula of social control, the most basic pattern of personal and political recognition. The categories of knowledge, control, and privilege are established with one single gesture (Althusser 1971, 163).” (1) Jill Magid’s work turns the gesture back, and waves back to the invisible, giving it a voice and provoking it to become personal. This work also turns control from a bottom-down process into an ambiguous and sometimes playfully playing tag by forcing the surveying to constantly render her visible.

Visibility and invisibility are also central terms in Hito Steyerl’s visual essay How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File that lists a series of tactics on how to become invisible in different kinds of situations. She points out that visibility is defined by resolution. Resolution on the other hand is in its core technological where the quest for a constantly higher resolution has as a consequence that it becomes impossible to hide in the human dimension, since the smallest entity of resolution is already much smaller than a human body.